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Comment by fullstop | Hacker News Reader

My house was built in the 70s and I've tested surfaces over the years and have not found any lead paint yet. Another source of lead, unfortunately, is in children's toys.

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Even though lead was removed from petrol, there is a lot in soil and dust in cities, and that is still agitated out into the air.

This article shows how there is lead in Londons air despite it being removed in the 90s from fuel:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/224474/lead-from-leaded-petr...

Remember that avgas still uses leaded fuel (though that will hopefully improve soon).

Leaded avgas is only used in small, propeller-driven aircraft like Cessnas. Jet fuel does not contain lead.

Exactly. And to think it used to be in all passenger car gasoline!

Same thing with asbestos, there is a non-zero background level in the air because it was used in so many products for a long time.

> Another source of lead, unfortunately, is in children's toys.

Yeah this was going to be my question, is where is the lead coming from? Water, toys, what else?

Having a 4 week old, seeing this concerns me so I'd love to do what I can to avoid it.

Soil, water, lead pipes.

It's in the solder used to join pipes together.

Even after "lead pipes" were banned in the US, it was still used to join copper pipe together.

It's also in solder used in electronics, although I doubt that half of American children have a parent who regularly solders at home.

Modern mass-market electronics have been made with lead-free solder for a long time because of RoHS regulations (I believe this is an EU thing but most manufacturers have retooled everything to be lead-free). I'd argue that electronics solder is a lot less of a concern anyway since it's usually only in hard-to-reach places. It's a major concern for disposal, however.

Paints and "metallic" jewelries for kids, it often makes the news.

Avoid anything over 50 years old.

Old stuff has lead, but also has a bunch of other things that are of dubious health effects.

But new stuff contains more volatiles, more fluorinated plastics, and a far wider array of newish chemicals we don't yet have good data on (nanoparticles etc.)

Overall, I'd say that unless you have a lifetime to test and research everything, it probably isn't worth making any lifestyle choices to avoid unhealthy materials, because in doing so there's a good chance you'll just switch to another. But you should ask your government to put more money into population wide health initiatives, like research into health effects of chemicals.

Or avoid anything that wasn't made the same way 400 years ago. ;-)

Except pewter. Avoid that.

But like -- wood, cast iron, earthenware, unleaded glass, natural fibers (cotton, linen, hemp), vegetable dyes: I don't see how you go wrong with those.

I got a bathtub stopper and I saw on the box a Prop65 warning. Not sure if it's because of the lead.

Smaller general aviation aircraft still use 100LL gasoline (the LL stands for low lead) - and even though there’s lead-free replacement candidates (still going through regulatory approval, at least in the US), it’s been known that areas around airports with frequent GA traffic have higher levels of lead in the air, and children living near said airports may have elevated levels of lead in their blood (https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2021/08/06/new-study-finds-l...)

What about the pilots? I always get this fuel on my hands during preflight when sumping the fuel tanks.

Lead doesn't absorb through the skin. You have to breathe or eat it. As long as you thoroughly wash your hands after preflight, the only exposure should be the fumes and exhaust in the air.

No, tetraethyl lead, which is the form of lead found in fuel, is easily absorbed through the skin.

>and children living near said airports may have elevated levels of lead in their blood

Or is that because the upper middle class types avoid airport noise like the plague leaving the housing stock around airports cheaper, older and more leaded?

The correlation between low income and lead (all known bad chemicals highly used in the past really) exposure is well studied rather than speculative.

Radiolab just had an interesting episode on how we used to use leaded gasoline and how it resulted in lead being everywhere.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/heavy...

In the course of regular pediatric visits the doctor should at some point check the blood for lead early on. Not on every visit, of course, they have a schedule for the blood work.

As for the concerns, if there're reasons, doctor recommened us to check the water first. There may also be free test kits from the city.

Also, out of caution, we were running the water off for some time before filling pots and doing washes, esp. in the morning.

Dust wise, there's no easy solution. The wet cleaning, mopping the floors regularly and maintaining reasonable humidity indoors would help keep dust down... but babies love to crawl.

Perhaps being outdoors more may be an option, unless it's even more polluted.

If breastfed, mama's health is equally cruicial!

Lead paint is still occasionally found on toys imported from China. But after a previous recall incident the major US toy brands now have better control over their supply chains so the risk should be low.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697...

Watch out for dishes, especially older ones. The older Lenox dishes my family used for 40 years turned out to have heavily leaded glaze on the surface. By the time I was using them for my own kids, the glaze could turn a lead-check swab bright red, which means we were eating that lead.

After I discovered this I replaced all of our dishes with plain white Corelle. Corelle currently uses lead-free glaze; the plain white is just me being an absolutist.

Note that vintage Corelle and almost all other vintage cookware contains some amount of lead in the decorative glaze.

Here's a good resource for lead content in the household items your kids are likely to encounter:

https://tamararubin.com/

I stripped some woodwork in an 18th century house that had been painted over numerous times. I didn't bother to test, I just assumed that at least some of those layers were lead. The options for removal and disposal are limited and nasty.

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